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Selling to B2B customers is typically complex and multi-layered. For B2B businesses this translates into rigorous and informed planning. To make this easier to understand, I suggest that there are two main questions that every B2B business should answer:
1- How do our customers go about shopping for B2B solutions (their actual customer journey)?
2- How can we align our marketing and sales strategies to correspond to our customer journey?
These questions are so broad that they can be broken into many more questions: who are our ICPs (ideal customer profiles)? Where do they hang out the most (marketing channels)? How do they keep themselves updated on industry news? How do they research and compare products? What type of content do they use the most? What are some trust signals for them? How do they connect and communicate with us (touchpoints)? And a lot more questions that need to be answered for a successful marketing and sales strategy.
If you think this is a lot of work, you’re absolutely right. But how could this be done? Enter the B2B sales and marketing funnel. These funnels are designed based on your customers’ actual buying journey so they’re meant to be practical and effective. I will also suggest a strategy to make the traditional concept of B2B marketing and sales funnel more malleable to the changing needs of every B2B business. Let’s find out what they are and how to create and optimize them.
What is a B2B Sales and Marketing Funnel?
A B2B funnel is a structured step-by-step system for attracting, converting, and retaining customers based on their customer journey. A B2B marketing and sales funnel typically has three main stages:
1- Awareness stage or top of the funnel (ToFu): when potential customers (leads) realize they have a problem that needs a solution and then start researching the solutions. This stage is more of a B2B marketing funnel and your marketing team is very active here.
2- Consideration stage or middle of the funnel (MoFu): when leads are already familiar with various solutions and are considering which one to choose. This is the stage during which your marketing funnel starts transforming into a B2B sales funnel.
3- Conversion and retention stage or bottom of the funnel (BoFu): when leads turn into paying customers and keep using a solution. Two main focuses of this stage are increasing conversion rates and improving customer loyalty. This is the part in which your sales team plays an important role.
Each one of these funnel stages could have multiple steps depending on how your ICPs (ideal customer profile) purchase a product. So the goal of a B2B marketing and sales funnel is not to provide a pedantic blueprint for your marketing campaigns. It provides a point of departure for researching your audience and then devising a marketing strategy that corresponds to customer touchpoints, needs, and behavior.
Do you really need a B2B marketing and sales funnel?
Yes, you do! Why?
Because B2B buyers are more intelligent and have more informed and complicated customer journeys. And unless you research their journeys in detail and align your marketing efforts and sales strategies with them, you won’t have much luck converting B2B buyers.
B2B buyers actively seek out sellers on five primary occasions:
- when they’re looking for new opportunities to improve their business results (71%)
- when they need a solution to fix a problem (62%)
- when they’re doing a causal analysis of a situation (49%)
- when they’ve to choose from possible solution providers (54%)
- when they’re waiting for them to provide a quote or proposal (30%)
On every occasion, you need to understand the buyer’s needs, personalize the communication, build trust in your products/services, and shift them a step closer to making a purchase.
A B2B sales and marketing funnel helps you achieve these goals by taking a structured approach to walking customers through the purchase journey. It provides relevant content to buyers at every step of their journey and helps build long-term relationships.
Create and Optimize Your B2B Sales and Marketing Funnel
A B2B sales and marketing funnel is successful if you optimize every funnel stage to answer buyers’ queries and help them make an informed decision. Here’s how you can do it.
Top of the Funnel (ToFu): Awareness or interest Stage
The awareness stage is when you introduce your product to B2B buyers. They become aware of your business and its products or services. This is also the stage of the funnel when these buyers are either looking for ideas to grow their business or finding a solution to a problem.
But they’re also unaware of the exact problem — the symptoms they’re experiencing led them to look out for reasons.
So, your job here is to help them find answers because 70% of their buying journey is about research. Your only chance to become a significant part of that research is to increase brand awareness. Once they start noticing your products or what you have to offer, you’ll gain a permanent spot in their minds.
But how?
Tip #1: Show up in the SERPs
Create SEO-optimized and helpful content to help B2B buyers with their research. It should be a mix of answers, data and insights, education, and opinions.
Help them contextualize their problem with your content.
For example, instead of talking about how “X helps manage your projects,” educate them about the repercussions of missing project tasks. The familiarity of the consequences will spark their curiosity, and they’ll now want to know what you’re suggesting.
Clickup, a project management tool, wrote about the bottlenecks in project management — addressing the most common problems of project managers. It also covered the consequences these managers face with poorly managed projects.
The article then explores possible solutions to those problems using product screenshots. This is how managers discover that project management could be a task, but there are tools on the market to help them with it.
Organic traffic is one of the greatest ways to acquire qualified leads because people already have some kind of interest in your content. Utilizing APIs like the Google Search API can further enhance visibility by ensuring that your content appears prominently in relevant search queries, thus increasing the chances of discovery by your target audience.
Tip #2: Go all out with content formats
Content marketing drives traffic to B2B websites. It can generate leads and drive them into your sales funnel. 65% of B2B buyers are the most receptive to short-form content like blogs, articles, and infographics. These formats are especially attractive for buyers with little to no time to read huge chunks of content.
However, other content formats, such as webinars, podcasts, explainer videos, and social media posts (e.g. LinkedIn posts), are quite popular in the awareness stage and should never be neglected. Top of the funnel is also the stage that attracts people into your funnel. For many B2B SaaS businesses the metric of success in the awareness stage is lead generation. So a piece of content in the awareness stage could be considered powerful if it generates a lot of leads.
Middle of the Funnel (MoFu): Consideration or decision Stage
The next stage is the consideration or evaluation stage which brings B2B buyers to a point where they know about your products/services and their benefits. They’ve been reading your content, researching more about your offers, and verifying the information through different mediums.
But these buyers are also looking at two or three other brands that offer similar services as yours and claim to provide the same benefits. So now, the buyers have a choice—multiple products offering similar benefits. Which one shall they choose?
Here, your job is to give the buyers reasons to select your product over the competitors, with proof to support your argument. You must help them easily compare different products, giving them a birds-eye view of every possible solution.
Even though you’d want to keep the competition one-sided, let the buyers decide what’s best for them. But help them make an informed decision. The key here is to provide a reliable means of communication with your audience to get your message across. The standard is email marketing but anything else would work.
Tip #1: Make comparison easy for your buyers
Create product comparison guides that clearly show how your product differs from the competitors’ and what else it can offer. But don’t make it a feature-stuffed piece.
Instead, conduct surveys to understand buyers’ pain points or specific problems. Use the answers to define your product and compare it with others.
For example, Asana wrote a comparison page competing with Monday.com. What caught our interest was how it addressed the difference between Asana and Monday.com.
Aside from the usual Asana vs. Monday.com comparison table, it directly answered buyers’ most common questions when switching to a different platform. Asana understood the challenges of migration and addressed them spot on.
Tip #2: Capitalize on proof of work
Nothing can beat the power of customer reviews, testimonials, and case studies. The buyers are closer to purchasing when they see their peers using the products or services and enjoying their benefits.
One option is to create a detailed case study or white paper focusing on how your product or service was the best solution to a business’s problem. From clarifying the problem statement to presenting your product/service as the ultimate solution — ensure the case study has numbers to validate your claims.
Another option is to obtain customer testimonials—in written or recorded form—to share the buyers’ perspective of your offerings.
For example, Freshworks, an online cloud-based customer support software, has an entire playlist on YouTube dedicated to one- to two-minute recorded customer testimonials. These videos feature happy customers sharing their problems and the alternate solutions they tried before using Freshworks.
Then, they explain how Freshworks is the best of all, giving use cases where the product has delivered significant results.
Bottom of the Funnel (BoFu): Conversion and Retention Stage
The conversion stage of the funnel differs from business to business, depending on the definition and depth of the sales and marketing funnel. For some, it means buyers opting for a free trial, a product demo, or signing up for your newsletter. For others, improving conversion rates means increasing actual sales. They might even have some extra B2B sales funnel stages here.
In both cases, your job is to give the buyers that final push, helping them loosen their purse strings! In other words, this is when you try to complete your sales cycle and close the deal.
But then, it doesn’t stop here! You have to keep the buyers glued to your brand, its products, and the experience they offer. That’s the customer retention stage — the hardest part of the sales and marketing funnel — where you double the efforts to maintain the relationship with your buyers.
Often, a loyalty program or launching a webinar series is the easiest way to stay on top of your buyers’ minds—they’ll keep getting updates on new offers while enjoying the perks of being a loyal customer. The key is focusing on customer experience here.
Tip #1: Give your buyers a reason to purchase from you
At most times, all it takes is a highly persuasive email with an irresistible offer to convert free trials into paid opt-ins.
The above email is a perfect example of how a potential buyer (or a decision maker) lingering on the verge of purchasing would finally drop their weapons at the sight of a lucrative discount. 35% less with more features and capabilities — the offer is quite tempting!
Tip #2: Zero in on conversion-focused content
In the bottom of the funnel content, the focus is optimizing conversions. And this would mean eliminating the bottlenecks and addressing concerns. Whether it is a hyper-personalized message or a detailed product review, ensure you address every possible doubt in your buyers’ minds.
Even Forrester’s B2B Buyer’s Journey Survey suggests that vendor interactions, which involve buyers speaking to product experts or sales representatives, positively influence their decisions. Why? Because the buyers get clarity about the best solution to satisfy their needs.
Tip #3: Cross-sell or upsell to existing customers
You already have your buyers’ trust with their first purchase. It’s time to make the most of it by cross-selling or upselling your products/services.
For example, Zendesk’s customer service interactions are a perfect opportunity to guide users toward a new product feature. Whenever users approach an issue, the resolution is often a subtle hint towards adding a new feature to the subscription.
Since the users trust Zendesk, they know it offers the best solutions — whether it’s a service or a new feature, they’re getting it as a solution.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid When Building Your B2B Sales and Marketing Funnel
The worst you can do to a sales and marketing funnel is shift your entire focus on the conversion stage. B2B buyers are all into making informed choices — they wouldn’t dare to be impulsive and jump straight to paying for a subscription.
Here are some other blunders you can avoid.
Forgetting customer segmentation
Every buyer has a different need at every stage of their purchase journey. And if you bundle all of them together, you’re only wasting your efforts. B2B funnels give you a blueprint of how each step of your customers’ journey should be handled by your marketing and sales team. In order to do this, you need to segment your audience. Use different tags in your marketing automation tool to segment your audience.
Ignoring unconverted leads
Analyzing wins is important, but analyzing unconverted leads is even more so. If you ignore what caused your potential buyers to drop out at the last minute, your sales and marketing funnel can only go so far. You need to understand why people quit your funnel. Is it an element in your landing pages (copy, pricing, CTA, etc.)? Are your messages unclear and ineffective? Do you need to reach out to your customers on different channels? Ignoring unconverted leads will eventually impact the performance of your sales pipeline.
Creating a weak offer or CTA
A lack of call to action (CTA) or a weak one is usually a big issue in the sales process. By the end of your message, the potential buyer is confused—“What am I supposed to do with this information?”
Sometimes, your offer is not gripping enough to make people complete their purchasing decision. It might lack substance, proof, and conviction.
Writing a bland copy
By bland, we’re not only indicating textual content. That’s a huge part of the deal, but visuals are just as important. A perfect mix of content and design—appealing enough to keep the buyers on the edge of their seats—is missing from the bland copy.
A New Perspective on the Concept of the Funnel:
As a B2B company, you might be tempted to treat a B2B marketing and sales funnel as a fixed dictum. This is the problem I see with many B2B marketing and sales strategies. But the idea behind a funnel is to prioritize customer needs and preferences in your strategy even if it means veering off the common practices for the sake of your customers.
For example, a standard marketing practice for the awareness stage is targeting informational search queries on search engines. That’s what every B2B business aims to do. However, you might find out that your audience is not exactly active on search engines or that you could invest your budget in a more effective strategy. Then you should definitely go for it.
Or you might feel that a product-led piece of content (say a case study) is very effective for lead generation or converting people who are already in the awareness stage. My theory is that a lot of content used to hook viewers in the awareness stage are not effective anymore in the B2B area. So you might want to push your BoFu content up your funnel and into your awareness strategy. The ultimate goal is to engage your audience and increase sales so keep an eye on how your audience responds to your strategy and make the right move even if it means forgetting the traditional funnel.
Author bio
Mostafa Dastras helps businesses grow with content marketing. He has written for HubSpot, WordStream, SmartInsights, LeadPages, Qualtrics, MarketingProfs, and some other top websites. Visit his blog, LiveaBusinessLife.com, or connect with him on LinkedIn to find out how he can help you.
